doi2bib3 0.3.1

Fetch BibTeX from DOI, or resolve arXiv IDs to DOI and fetch BibTeX

doi2bib3

doi2bib3 is a small Python utility to fetch BibTeX metadata for a DOI or to resolve arXiv identifiers to DOIs and fetch their BibTeX entries. It accepts DOI inputs, DOI URLs, arXiv IDs/URLs (modern and legacy), publisher landing pages, and uses a sequence of resolution strategies to return a BibTeX string. This tool combines the features of doi2bib and doi2bib2.

It will be submitted to PyPI soon.

Key behaviors

• Provides bibtex entry for DOI and arXiv links.
• Automatically detects arXiv inputs (e.g. 2411.08091, arXiv:2411.08091, or https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08091) and queries the arXiv API for a DOI.
• For non-arXiv inputs: attempts DOI normalization, content negotiation at doi.org, Crossref transform, and as a last resort a Crossref bibliographic search.

A GUI frontend is available: Check out QuickBib.

Installation

Create a virtual environment and install runtime dependencies:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Install the package for local development:

pip install -e .

Arch Linux

In Arch Linux you can install it from the AUR with the command yay -S doi2bib3.

Ubuntu

You can use our official PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/quickbib
sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-doi2bib3

CLI usage

The CLI accepts a single positional identifier and an optional -o/--out path to save the BibTeX output. When installed, the package installs a console script named doi2bib3 (configured in pyproject.toml). From the repository root you can also run the provided main.py shim.

# using the local shim
python main.py <identifier> [-o OUT]

# or when installed as console script
doi2bib3 <identifier> -o references.bib

Examples

Fetch by DOI (bare DOI or DOI URL):

doi2bib3 10.1038/nphys1170
doi2bib3 https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1170

ArXiv inputs (detected automatically):

doi2bib3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08091
doi2bib3 arXiv:2411.08091
doi2bib3 2411.08091
doi2bib3 hep-th/9901001

Save to a file:

doi2bib3 https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1170 -o paper.bib

Note: If the tool is not installed, you can run it with python main.py https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1170 and so on.

Programmatic usage

The package exposes a small programmatic API so you can use doi2bib3 from Python code. The most convenient entry point is the package-level fetch_bibtex function which mirrors the CLI behavior and returns normalized BibTeX by default:

from doi2bib3 import fetch_bibtex

# Get normalized BibTeX (default)
bib = fetch_bibtex('https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305943120')
print(bib)

# Get the raw provider output without normalization
raw = fetch_bibtex('10.1073/pnas.2305943120', normalize=False)

You can also invoke the thin CLI wrapper from utils when writing tests or automation:

from doi2bib3.utils import cli_doi2bib3
cli_doi2bib3(['https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08091', '--out', 'paper.bib'])

License

This project is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPL-3.0-only).

Acknowledgements

Parts of the code and documentation were assisted by copilot.